__ By Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought”
“Israel Today” Newsletter, December 20, 2011

The legacy of Chanukah – faith, patriotism, defiance of extreme odds and tenacity in the battle of liberty against tyranny – has underlined the American spirit since the early Pilgrims, enhancing the unique foundation of the US-Israel covenant: shared values.

For instance, the statue of Judah the Maccabee, the hero of the Jewish rebellion against the Syrian-Seleucid Empire, is displayed at the West Point Military Academy, the most prestigious US military academy, founded in 1802. The statue of Judah the Maccabee, known for his principle-driven leadership and daring battle tactics, is displayed along with the statues of Joshua, David, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Hector, King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon – “the Nine Worthies.”

George Washington became acquainted with the spirit of the Maccabees, upon settling, in December (Chanukah) 1777, at his new headquarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, with ill-equipped, weary troops. Faced with a super-power, George III of Britain, Washington concluded that only a dramatic change could avoid a defeat. According to the diary entries of Louisa Hart, Washington told the Harts about a Jewish solider at Valley Forge who lit a Chanukah candle and explained its significance. Washington’s reaction was: “Perhaps we are not as lost as our enemies would have us believe. I rejoice in the Maccabees’ success, though it is long past…It pleases me to think that miracles still happen.” Six months later, on June 19, 1778, the Continental Army implemented the battle tactics of Judah the Maccabee, leaving Valley Forge in pursuit of the British, who were moving towards New York. Although the war would linger for five more years, Washington won a decisive victory.

Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were inspired by the Maccabees, proposing “Rebellion against Tyrants is obedience to God” as the American official seal. Just like the Founding Fathers, the Maccabees were a tiny minority of “rebels” – condemned by the “loyalist/pragmatist” Jewish establishment – rebelling against an oppressive super-power. They prevailed due to their conviction-driven determination. They knew that swimming against the stream gets one closer to the source. The Maccabees were a role-model for Paul Revere, who was referred to as “a modern day Maccabee” and the organizers of the Boston Tea Party, who realized that there were no free lunches for freedom-seeking nations.

“In God We Trust” was inspired, also, by the Maccabees’ battle cry, which adopted Moses’ battle cry against the builders of the Golden Calf. A literal translation of the battle cry is “Whoever trusts God; join me!” The Maccabees’ sacrifice and political-incorrectness, also, inspired Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death.”

In 2011, Chanukah is still a living experience in the US. For example, the residents of Billings, Montana celebrate Chanukah in solidarity with the Jewish community of forty families, and in protest of the 1993 vandals who broke windows of Jewish homes that displayed Chanukah menorahs. In response, more than 10,000 of the city’s residents put make-shift menorahs in their own windows. They persist, annually, in this ritual.

Chanukah and the Maccabees have become an integral part of the American way of life, culturally and politically. Americans respect the legacy of the Maccabees, who fought the Syrian-Seleucid super-power, mostly, in the mountains of Judea and Samaria, in the Judean Desert and in Jerusalem. Judah the Maccabee’s own Valley Forge was at Beit El; his capital was Jerusalem; he scored dramatic victories in Beit Horon (over Seron), Hadashah (over Nicanor), Beit Zur (over Lysias) and Ma’aleh Levona (over Apolonius); he was defeated at Elazar and killed at Ba’al Hatzor – all are located beyond the “1967 Lines.”

The descendants of the Maccabees are not “occupiers” in the cradle of their own history. Chanukah is not a holiday of “occupation,” but a holiday of deliverance. Chanukah is a holiday which highlights the moral-high-ground of Jews in their ancestral homeland.

Shimon the Maccabee – who succeeded Judah and Yonatan the Maccabees – articulated the Jewish territorial case, when responding to an ultimatum by Antiochus, who demanded an end to the Jewish “occupation” of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Gezer and Ekron: “We have not occupied a foreign land; we have not ruled a foreign land; we have liberated the land of our forefathers from foreign occupation.”

Pressuring the Jewish State to withdraw from the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria defies the American story. Either you are with George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and other defenders of liberty, or you provide – inadvertently – a tailwind to the forces of tyranny.

GrassTopsUSA

Exclusive Commentary
By Don Feder

        Wednesday marks the 70th. Anniversary of the Japanese attack on our Pacific Fleet. “Remember Pearl Harbor” was the Second World War’s most enduring slogan – sported on buttons, blazoned across billboards and blared from the radio in one of the era’s popular songs. (“Let’s remember Pearl Harbor as we go to meet the foe. Let’s remember Pearl Harbor as we did the Alamo.”)

         Remember Pearl Harbor? Remember the Alamo? Remember the Maine, Plymouth Rock and the Golden Rule? But how can you remember what you never knew? Americans are tragically ignorant of our past.

         How can you know where you are if you don’t know how you got there? Without the past as a guide, the future is fog-shrouded sea marked “Here be monsters” on a map.

         Pearl Harbor was one of those defining moments in American history, like the drafting of the Constitution, the Louisiana Purchase and the firing on Ft. Sumter. U.S. deaths, military and civilian, numbered 2,403. The Japanese sank or severely damaged 18 ships, including 8 battleships, and destroyed 161 of our planes. 

It forced our entry into a war we had to win for humanity’s sake and our survival. Pearl Harbor was the first step on a road that ended 3 years and eight months later with Japan and Germany smoldering rubble. More than 16 million Americans wore their country’s uniform. Nearly 300,000 died in battle. More than any other event, World War II defined the American century.

         According to the Bureau of Veterans Affairs, as of this May, approximately 2 million World War II vets were still with us. But we are losing them at the rate of around 850 a day. In February 2009, their median age was 86. In a few years, it will be over 90. In another decade, the survivors will be counted in the thousands. Their children will follow in 20 or 30 years. Who then will remind us of Pear Harbor, the Bataan Death March, Guadalcanal, Midway, Normandy, the Bulge and the U.S.S. Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay?

         The deficit in historical knowledge is at least as ominous as the national debt. Sheep have no memory – individual or collective. They are creatures to be sheared and, ultimately, consumed.

         In June, the results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (“the nation’s report card”) were announced. The history portion of the test, administered to a representative sampling of slightly over 30,000 students, revealed that: most 4th. graders couldn’t say why Lincoln was an important figure, very few high school students could identify China as North Korea’s ally during the Korean War, and in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, only 2% of high school seniors knew that when the court said “in the field of public education, separate but equal has no place,” it referred to segregating students by race.

         About the same time, Newsweek finally did something useful. It administered the U.S. citizenship test to 1,000 native-born Americans. The results made the kids look like David McCullough – 33% didn’t know when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, 65% hadn’t a clue about what happened at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 (By a process of deductive reasoning, you’d think they could have figured out that it involved the U.S. Constitution) and 85% couldn’t name the president during World War I.

         Then there was the 2006 survey of 14,000 college students. More than half didn’t know the century in which the Jamestown colony was founded, why NATO was established or – get ready to be really depressed – in which document the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” are found. Hint; it’s not the Magna Carta, the Koran or Napoleon’s farewell address to his troops.

         There’s a National Black History Month, a Jewish American Heritage Month, a National Tibetan American Heritage Month, a Gay and Lesbian Pride Month – as well as commemorations for Irish-Americans, Hispanics and Puerto Ricans – but no designated time for Americans to learn about and celebrate their history and heritage. We’re interested only in what divides us, not what should unite us.

         In most U.S. schools, assuming it’s taught at all, history is presented as multicultural mélange. Instead of learning of our greatness, we obsess over our failures – at times real, at times imaginary. How can schools teach about the Constitution or the industrial revolution in America when they’re so busy doing penance for the slave trade, Wounded Knee, the Trail of Tears, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and Jim Crow.

         Since they don’t learn history in schools, where then do America’s yut (as Joe Pesci would say) turn for instruction on their nation’s past? To Hollywood, of course.

         They can learn what peaceful, ecologists the plains Indians were in “Dances with Wolves” (not to mention the brutishness of the U.S. Cavalry – with the exception of Kevin Costner). They can learn to be non-judgmental about the architects of the Japanese sneak attack in “Pearl Harbor,” that the Hollywood 10 were innocent lambs, the victims of ruthless paranoia (in “The Front,” “Guilty By Suspicion” and “The Majestic”), that Americans who served in Vietnam were mostly war criminals and psychos (“Platoon,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “Casualties of War,” etc.), that John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA, FBI, Mafia and the redoubtable military-industrial complex (“JFK”), that the 1950s was a decade of hypocrisy, boredom and sexual repression (almost every movie about the ‘60s made after 1980, including the odious “Pleasantville”), and that urban America was shaped by warring ethnic tribes which vied with each other for savagery (“Gangs of New York”).

         Clint Eastwood’s latest essay in licking the Guccis of the Hollywood elite targets one of the left’s favorite villains of American history, “J Edgar,” or should I say “Gay Edgar,” in which we learn that the man who led the FBI for half a century was a repressed homosexual (pure conjecture based on his friendship with another lifelong bachelor) and a cross-dressing Svengali who talked Woodrow Wilson into launching the post-World War I Palmer Raids and somehow persuaded the loveable Kennedy brothers to wiretap Martin Luther King. (In reality, the Kennedys were concerned about the communist connections of several King associates.)

         Because it didn’t fit the plot, Eastwood left out the FBI’s war against the Klan in the 1920s, or the fact that Hoover was so successful at tracking German covert agents that thousands were arrested on America’s entry into World War II and there was no successful act of sabotage during the war. Oh, and J Edgar Fascist opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans (reporting to Roosevelt that FBI investigations produced no evidence of disloyalty on their part), a program supported by those great civil libertarians FDR and then California Governor, later Chief Justice, Earl Warren.

         The domestic left has never forgiven Hoover for his fight against communist subversion during the Cold War. He even wrote a book called “Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism In America and How to Fight It.”) The beast!

         Because ordinary Americans know so little of their nation’s history, they readily fall for the left’s favorite myths, including:

1.  There’s something in the Constitution mandating something called “the separation of church and state” – words which appear nowhere in the Constitution. Among other things, the First Amendment provides, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” – which, in the context of 18th century America, meant no national church, like the Church of England.

2.  Revolutions usually produce freedom and respect for human rights. – On the one hand, there’s the American Revolution, on the other – all of the rest, including the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the so-called Arab Spring, a stalking horse for the Muslim Brotherhood.

3.  That Franklin D. Roosevelt ended the Great Depression – which is why the unemployment rate was almost as high in 1938, after 5 years of FDR, as it was in 1933 (19% versus 25%). It wasn’t the New Deal but World War II that brought America out of the Depression. Roosevelt’s policies – which warred on the marketplace – prolonged it.

4.  That Hiroshima and Nagasaki were American war crimes: – They saved least a million lives (U.S. and Japanese) which would have been lost in an invasion of the home islands. Even after the Hiroshima bombing, a majority of the Japanese war cabinet wanted to fight on (“an honorable death” for the nation). After Nagasaki, Emperor Hirohito persuaded those who ruled in his name to accept the Allies’ Potsdam terms.

5.  Israel currently occupies “Palestinian land.”– The Palestinians (so-called) are an invented people who never exercised sovereignty over any part of the territory that comprises the modern state of Israel. Who was the last president or monarch of Palestine? From the destruction of the Second Jewish Commonwealth in the First century CE until the reestablishment of Israel in 1948, no independent state ever existed there.

6.  America stole Texas, California and the Southwest from Mexico. – In 1845, Mexico was spoiling for a war with the United States and threatened to launch one if we annexed Texas. (Mexico City’s position was that while Mexico had the right to secede from Spain, Texans did not have the same right.) Hostilities started in April 1846, when Mexican troops ambushed a squad of U.S. dragoons, killing 14. Mexico’s army was led by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, a ruthless tyrant and butcher of the Alamo. Besides, if we didn’t “steal” Texas, California, etc., today these areas would be ruled by a tinhorn drug-ocracy with pervasive poverty and an astronomical murder rate.

7.  That communism and socialism worked somewhere, sometime: – From the Jamestown colony to Venezuela, they are history’s most consistent and spectacular failures. Consider the contrast of North and South Korea, East and West Germany, before reunification, or Massachusetts and New Hampshire. China only started to come out of the Dark Ages when it moved away from Marxist economics.

8.  American involvement in the Vietnam War was a tragic mistake. – The way Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon fought the war was a tragic mistake. Vietnam was lost not on the battlefield but with Watergate and Democratic congressional victories in 1974. Still, if we’d never fought there, dominoes would have fallen. All of Southeast Asia might be communist today.         

The left is conflicted. On the one hand, it believes history is irrelevant, that each generation is born anew, completely unaffected by the past. On the other, it wants to control what snippets of historical knowledge reach the masses. As Churchill is reputed to have said, “History is written by victors.” The left reigns victorious in the public schools, higher education, and the news and entertainment media. Thus have its myths become conventional wisdom.

         In his oft misquoted axiom, American philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Those with a basic knowledge of history at least have the option of remembering it or not. But what of those who were never taught the past in the first place? Like idiots, they wander aimlessly about stumbling into wars, recessions and social disasters.

  Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.